The production and marketing of grain and grain-related products world wide is a multi-billion dollar a year industry. In the United States along, about 2.1 million producers deliver about 300 million metric tons of grain to U.S.-based elevators each year and about 1.08 million railroad cars are used to transport grain; in all 23 million metric tons of grain are shipped by barge each year.
In the industrialized world, a vanishing small number of farm-related workers has generated a situation in which most people have very little actual contact with or knowledge of precisely where their food was grown, harvested, shipped, and processed. This also means that most people in industrialized nations live and consume foods far removed from where they are produced. This has led many officials and food safety experts to note how vulnerable the food production and distribution system is to either deliberate or inadvertent contamination.
Accordingly, there is a pressing need for methods to enable people to track potential contamination within the grain-based food chain. The need to insure a safe supply of food has always existed in the food industry. What has become glaringly apparent of late is that this chain is vulnerable to nefarious assault as well as natural and other man-made phenomenon.
The threat to the nation's food supply by “Agro-Terrorism” has been detailed in various reports, including, for example, “Terrorism and the Grain Handling System in Canada and the United States,” by William Ngange, William Wilson, and James Nolan. The world-wide threat from Agro-Terrorism has been summarized in a report issued by the United Nations, World Health Organization in a report entitled, “Terrorist Threats to Food: Guidelines for Establishing and Strengthening Prevention and Response Systems.” The World Heath Organization defines food terrorism as:
“The act or threat of deliberate contamination of food for human consumption with chemicals, biological and radio nuclear agents for pure reasons of causing injury or death to civilian population and/or disrupting social, economic or political stability.”
These reports and the like focus on assessing the threat that contaminated foods, including, for example, contaminated grain stores, pose to civilian populations. These reports do not propose solutions, although both recommend increased vigilance of the food supply by those responsible for producing and transporting foods, including grain. Clearly, there is a threat to the world's food supply and there is a need for a means of testing, monitoring, and tracking foods including grains throughout the food producing system.
Still another concerning for many consumers both in the Untied Sates and abroad is the unintended commingling of food groups with a genetically modified organism (GMO). Many consumers expressed a clear preference for varieties of grains that are free of GMOs. Many GMO plants are almost identical to non-GMO plants, differences in some instances being only one or a handful of genes. This makes differentiating between grains that are derived from a GMO plant versus non-GMO plant derived claims very difficult. One approach is to carefully document the source of all of the grains and to certify the origin of the food-stuff in one practice within the industry such food-stuffs are referred to as ‘identity? preserved’. The current approach does not provide a ready method for widespread easy testing of bulk grain stores to empirically certify that the grain is GMO free.
Various aspects disclosed herein address the need for efficient means to test for and determine the presence of various contaminants, including chemical and microbiological agents as well as GMOs in bulk grain stores.